Sofia,
Bulgaria, Wednesday, May 7th, 2008Jason Juett, of Marion, Iowa, scored a draw against former FIDE champion
and world No. 4, Veselin Topalov, on Tuesday, in an
exhibition game to kick off the 2008 M-Tel Masters tournament. Juett faced a blindfolded Topalov at the Central Military
Club, in downtown Sofia, and managed to steer the game into a fairly equal
minor piece ending. Topalov offered a draw after both players had under one
minute remaining on their clocks, with no increment.

After the game, Topalov praised Juett's play, saying, "he never made any
big mistakes," and called the draw "a normal result.

Juett earned his all-expenses-paid trip to Bulgaria by winning an annual
guess-the-move contest called "Play Like Topalov," during last year's M-Tel Masters
tournament. He correctly guessed some 250 of Topalov's moves throughout the 2007
tournament, besting the second
place finisher by a wide margin. "I could probably have not played the
last day and still have won," explained Juett, a PhD student in
mathematics at the University of Iowa, who woke up before 7:00 AM each day to
participate in the contest. His grand prize trip is his first time traveling
solo outside the state of Iowa, and his first time in continental Europe.

"It's amazing. Even the day before I left it hadn't really sunk in that I
was going to Bulgaria. It was something, when if finally hit me -- what I was doing," he
mused.

Juett, a Class-A player, prepared slightly for 1...e5 or 1...c6, but not at all
for the Pirc Defense, one of Topalov's weapons Juett hoped to avoid. "I
tried to transpose to the King's Indian Defense, because I knew a little bit
about this unusual system with Nge2 and I thought that maybe it would take him
some more time in blindfold," Juett said, adding, "I didn't get to do
as much preparation as I'd wanted to."

Juett regularly follows international tournament coverage on the Internet Chess
Club, where he goes by the name "NimzoCapa," but he only began playing the game
himself during his undergraduate studies at Iowa State University.

"I'm really happy...I was just really hoping I could last longer than last
year's guy. I thought I'd have to play on all the way until mate to make it
past move thirty, but I was pretty determined."

Macauley Peterson is a
media developer and foreign correspondent for the ICC. He is currently in Sofia covering the
M-Tel Masters tournament for Chess.FMand may be reached at www.MacauleyPeterson.com.